You're My Country Music

KAREN PITTELMAN Karen & the Sorrows Email: [email protected] You’re My Country Music When I first started my band Karen & the Sorrows back in , I spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to love a culture that doesn’t love you back. As a white person, I fit the country fan stereotype that Nashville centers and celebrates. As a queer Jew with radical politics who grew up in a wealthy family in New York City? Not so much. But that didn’t stop country music from sinking into my bones. My father ran a company called Heartland Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article-pdf/32/2/11/407733/jpms_32_2_011.pdf by guest on 13 August 2020 Music that sold country compilation albums on TV, and I was entranced by his stories about shooting commercials with stars like The Oak Ridge Boys, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Don Williams. Their songs became the soundtrack of my childhood. Still, I’d never dreamed of making country music myself. I was singing in a punk band when, after suffering a particularly shattered heart, the twangy sounds of my past finally caught up with me. Suddenly, all I wanted to hear was the pedal steel guitar, and every song I wrote came out country. At first I tried to fight it—what place could there be for someone like me in this music? But it was no use. I’d gone country, and, whether or not Alan Jackson approved, there was no going back. So I started researching, and soon I found there was a long tradition of country queers, from early trailblazing musicians like Lavender Country and Doug Stevens & the Outband to the International Gay Rodeo Association to Big Apple Ranch, New York’sownLGBTcountry- western dance party. And yet, all the live country music spaces I was playing in New York and on the road weren’t queer, and the queer music spaces weren’t country. More than that, I missed theethicofthequeercoresceneI’d come up in, of being a part of shows where our politics mattered,wheremakingpeoplefeelwelcomewasasimportantasthemusic.1 I decided to take my cue from punk’s golden rule: if there’s something you need that doesn’t exist, do it yourself. In April of , I co-organized my first queer country festival, and I’ve been putting on shows and helping to build community for queer country musicians across the US ever since.2 . Queercore is a movement that began in the mid-s centered on music, zines, film, and other art. Its radical queer politics and sexuality were an in-your-face challenge to both homophobia in the punk scene and conservative and assimilationist tendencies in gay and lesbian communities. See Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution, dir. Yony Leyser (Altered Innocence/Fanatic, ) and the introduction to Curran Nault, Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture (New York: Routledge, ). I organized the first Gay Ole Opry festivals in Brooklyn in the spring and fall of with Riot Grrrl Ink, and then again in , and in Philadelphia in and . The Queer Country Monthly began in the summer of , switched to quarterly in late , and is still ongoing and often features musicians on tour from across the country. Journal of Popular Music Studies,Vol.,Number,pps.–.electronicISSN -.© by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/./jpms..... 11 With this new role, though, came more questions. Is it even possible to create a space for country music where everyone feels welcome? A home for all of us who love country even if it doesn’t love us back? How do we reckon with country’s place in conservative politics and upholding the status quo? With its nostalgia for an imagined America that erases the vio- lence and oppression of both our past and present? With all the complex ways it constructs whiteness and helps keep white supremacy in place?3 I think part of our responsibility as musicians and as fans is to tell a different story about country music—one the industry has tried to erase, but that has also always been there, at least in the margins. This story starts with country’srootsin“more than three centuries of vibrant cross-racial exchange and adaptation,” roots that are “profoundly and inextricably multiracial.”4 It centers all the ways that, despite the industry’sperva- sive racism, people of color have been making country music all along, from the genre’s Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article-pdf/32/2/11/407733/jpms_32_2_011.pdf by guest on 13 August 2020 earliest days through today.5 It lifts up songs that question patriarchy and heteronorma- tivity and demand that outsiders’ stories be heard.6 It highlights the kind of country music that speaks truth to power, that stands up for all those who have been treated After playing the Queer Country Quarterly while on tour, Eli Conley took the idea back to the Bay Area and started Queer Country West in , which is also ongoing. A Gay Ole Opry tour together with fellow queer country band Paisley Fields in helped us connect with musicians across the southeast. In , I put on Another Country, a daylong festival centering people of color and queer and trans musicians thinking about how we define country music. For more info and upcoming shows, see www.gayoleopry.com. .NadineHubbs,Rednecks, Queers and Country Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), ; Mark Allan Jackson, “Introduction: Richard Nixon, Johnny Cash, and the Political Soul of Country Music,” in Mark Allan Jackson, ed., The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, ); Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” in Charles A. Gallagher and France Winddance Twine, eds., Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the st Century: Changes and Challenges (London and New York: Routledge, ); and Diane Pecknold, “Introduction: Country Music and Racial Formation,” in Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix (Durham: Duke University Press, ). And for one reason that creating anti-racist spaces for country music matters so much, see Marcus K. Dowling, “When Being Black and Loving Country Music’s Got You Down: My Love of the Genre Has Been Stolen,” Noisey, October . https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/awae/when-being-black-and-loving- country-musics-got-you-down . Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, –,” in Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix (Durham: Duke University Press, ), . Another good overview is Rhiannon Giddens, “Community and Connection,” International Bluegrass Music Association World of Bluegrass Business Conference Keynote Address, September . Also see John W. Troutman, Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ): “What is missing from popular, and in many cases, scholarly understanding of southern music, however, is its cultural messiness. The South [for many blues and country scholars] is essentially a land of only two cultural ancestries, with black music coming from Africa and white music coming from ancient English or Scottish ballad traditions. The dozens of vibrant southern American Indian communities are excluded from this strictly black-and-white mosaic, as are people rooted more intimately in the Caribbean world, or migrants from Nova Scotia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, or, of course, Hawaiian troubadours,” −. See most of the essays in Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix (Durham: Duke University Press, ). Also Stephen A. King and P. Renee Foster, “Leave Country Music to White Folk’?: Narratives from Contemporary African- American Country Artists on Race and Music,” in Mark Allan Jackson, ed., The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, ). See Part II of Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers and Country Music. Also Mark Allan Jackson, “Stand Up to Your Man: The Working-Class Feminism of Loretta Lynn” in Jackson, ed., The Honky Tonk on the Left.Also“The day my mama socked it to the Harper Valley P.T.A.” 12 JOURNAL OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES JUNE 2020 unjustly, and that does it with a middle finger and a smile.7 And it celebrates the fans that the industry ignores, the country music lovers who know all the words to all the songs even if we don’t come to the shows—because it’s clear to us that those shows are a space where only white, straight, cis people are welcome. I know the odds are against us here, but I believe the power of country music is on our side. What makes country music country, above all, is its core commandment: tell the truth about your life. So even if our lives don’t count as country to some—or don’tcountatall, really—there’s no denying that the music itself has been hungering for our three chords and the truth all along.8 Idon’t sit down to write a queer country song. Honestly, I don’t even sit down to write a country song—theyjustcomeoutthatway.ButIdositdownanddomybesttowriteasong that tells the truth about my life. To mean what I sing.9 And since being queer is part of who I Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article-pdf/32/2/11/407733/jpms_32_2_011.pdf by guest on 13 August 2020 am, that inevitably ends up in the music, too.

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